Interdiction

For decades, Colombian drug trafficking organization have pursued their trade with amazingly professional ingenuity, staying a step ahead of authorities by coming up with one innovation after another. When false-paneled pickups and tractor-trailers began drawing suspicion at US checkpoints, the traffickers and their Mexican partners built air-conditioned tunnels under the border. When border agents started rounding up too many human mules, one group of Colombian smugglers surgically implanted heroin into purebred puppies. But the drug runners’ most persistently effective method has also been one of the crudest — semi-submersible vessels that cruise or are towed just below the ocean’s surface and can hold a ton or more of cocaine.

In the middle of this year, the Costa Rican Parliament authorized the arrival of 7,000 soldiers, 46 war ships, more than 200 helicopters, 10 Harrier planes and two submarines. The permission provoked the rejection of various parties and social sectors, regarding it as anti-constitutional and violating national sovereignty. "We are quite much worried with such an excessive military force to fight drug trafficking," said Victor Emilio Granados, from Partido Accesibilidad sin Exclusion (PASE) - Accessibility without Exclusion Party. Other parties such as Frente Amplio and Accion Cuidadana also rejected the US military presence.

In San Diego's Otay Mesa industrial area, warehouses may be housing cross-border tunnels used to smuggle huge amounts of drugs from Tijuana, Mexico. After two major underground passages were discovered last month less than two blocks from one of nation's busiest border crossings for cargo, federal authorities are knocking on doors of warehouse owners and tenants to ask for help.

Elaborate methods of smuggling cocaine and a record number of new unregulated drugs are challenging drug control policies in Europe. Traffickers are increasingly using exports such as clothes, plastics and fertilizers to smuggle cocaine base which is then extracted in clandestine laboratories.

It has been a year since Prime Minister John Key declared war on the drug P (methamphetamine). The authorities, and Mr. Key, had hoped to see P prices rising as evidence that the anti-P campaign was working. But that hasn't happened.

Peruvian President Alan García met with President Obama over the summer and directly accused Washington of pushing cocaine growth into Peru. The world's second-largest cocaine producer, Peru has asked for more US aid in combating drug trafficking and blamed Washington's policies for driving coca plant production in the country. Despite Peru's leaders repeatedly calling in recent months for more US aid in fighting drug trafficking, the new US ambassador said in her first media interview that resources are limited.